Faculty
Emin Gün Sirer
Former IC3 Co-Director
Emin Gün Sirer is the CEO and co-founder of Ava Labs. His research interests span distributed systems, cryptocurrencies, and software infrastructure for large scale services.
Researchers
Dr. Vero Estrada-Galinanes
Vero Estrada-Galinanes is a well-established researcher scientist member of DEDIS lab at EPFL. She was formerly an Associate Professor and research deputy leader at the Resilient Systems lab at University of Stavanger, Norway. She gained international experience acquired in academic environments, in the industry, as well as, in the public sector. She got a PhD thesis from University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and has been with the Storage Systems Research Center at UCSC, USA. She was the recipient of SNSF, MEXT (Monbukagakusho), and CONICET grants. Her research areas of interest are decentralized p2p systems, complex systems, distributed data structures, cryptoeconomics, and their cross-disciplinary applications to empower individuals, communities and societies.
Linus Gasser
Linus is working with his team of engineers to interface between PhD-students from Bryan Ford’s lab and industry partners. He likes to work with semester students, too, and help them to understand the implication of decentralised, distributed systems, and how ECC fits into that picture. His long-term goal is to build software for scalable, self-organizing communities. The current effort is at Cothority.
Postdocs
Jayamine Alupotha
Jayamine Alupotha was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the University of Bern’s CRYPTO group led by Professor Christian Cachin. She is mainly into privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols.
Ignacio Amores-Sesar
I consider myself to be a scholar with focus in interested in the overlap of cryptography and distributed systems. I am currently being hosted at Aarhus University by Jesper B. Nielsen. I first got interested in cryptography during my bachelor at the University of Oviedo, Spain. It was in Oviedo where I got started in research, in particular in experimental particle physics with the detector CMS. My interest in cryptography broadened during my master at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. After that, I completed my PhD in distributed systems under the supervision of Christian Cachin at the University of Bern, Switzerland. During my PhD, I had the opportunity to to do an internship at Google Cambridge, USA, with abhi shelat.
Iddo Bentov
Iddo Bentov is a postdoc at Cornell University, and author of a number of academic papers on cryptography and cryptocurrency. He has been involved in the Bitcoin space since mid-2011, and also works on succinct zero-knowledge proofs at SCIPR Lab.
Simone Colombo
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Cybersecurity group at King’s College London working on the social foundations of cryptography with Martin R. Albrecht and Ben Dowling. I completed my PhD at EPFL under the supervision of Bryan Ford in the DEDIS group.
Kasra Edalatnejad
Kasra is a post-doctoral researcher at the ENCRYPTO lab where he is working alongside Prof. Dr. Thomas Schneider. He earned my Ph.D. in the SPRING lab at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), advised by Prof. Carmela Troncoso. His research interests span the areas of privacy and security.
Cody Freitag
I just received my PhD in computer science at Cornell University (although technically at the Cornell Tech campus), advised by Rafael Pass. I am a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University with Daniel Wichs and Boston University with Ran Canetti, where I will be fortunately funded by a Khoury College Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship. My research primarily focuses on the theoretical foundations of cryptography. In particular, I’m interested in cryptographic proof systems and their applications in the decentralized setting of blockchains. I’ve also been interested in non-uniform models of security and differential privacy.
Steven Goldfeder
Steven Goldfeder is a scientist and co-founder of Offchain Labs. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a co-author of the leading textbook on cryptocurrencies.
Mahimna Kelkar
I am a CS postdoc at Columbia University affiliated with The Columbia-Ethereum Research Center. I recently graduated with a PhD from Cornell where I was advised by Ari Juels. My research focuses broadly on applied cryptography, security, and blockchains. I am also a research scientist at Offchain Labs.
Haobin Ni
Haobin is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington Programming Language and Software Engineering (PLSE) group, advised by Zachary Tatlock. At PLSE, I actively work on language design, program analysis, and compiler optimization, among other PL and system research directions. I’m also leading the PLSE PL Reading Group (PLRG) this year (2024-2025). He earned my Ph.D. degree in May 2024 from Cornell University, co-advised by Greg Morrisett and Robbert van Renesse. His research focuses on the formal verification of distributed systems.
Kirill Nikitin
Kirill Nikitin is a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center working with Prof. Gamze Gürsoy on building solutions for privacy-preserving sharing and analysis of genomics data. Previously, I completed my PhD in Computer Science at EPFL, where I was advised by Prof. Bryan Ford, and worked as a postdoc with Prof. Vitaly Shmatikov at Cornell Tech. My research interests revolve around topics in Privacy, Genomics, Anonymity, and Computer and Network Security. My past projects include work on reducing metadata leakage in network communication and encrypted data, building robust systems for private information retrieval, improving the security of software-update systems, and scaling and securing smart contracts.
Philipp Schneider
Philipp Schneider is a Postdoctoral Researcher at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. Prior to this he was a postdoc at the University of Bern, within the CRYPTO group led by Professor Christian Cachin. His research interests revolve around computational and security aspects of distributed systems.
Isaac Sheff
Isaac Sheff is a Computer Science Post-Doc at MPI-SWS. His research is primarily in distributed systems, with emphasis on security and heterogeneous trust.
Kyle Soska
I am an early cryptocurrency enthusiast that got my start by studying Silk Road and the darknet marketplace ecosystem in late 2013 during my PhD at Carnegie Mellon University and since then have been working on applications and privacy of decentralized ledger technologies in a Postdoc at UIUC. More recently I have focused my attention on cryptocurrency finance, both centralized (BitMEX, Binance, etc.) and decentralized with particular interest on the economics and incentives of DeFi primitives such as staking, farming, play2earn, algo stablecoins and more.
Students
Amit Agarwal
I am a Senior Research Scientist at Category Labs working in Cryptography. I recently completed my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (ranked 4 in the world for Computer Science research as per CSRankings website) where I was supervised by Prof. Dakshita Khurana and Prof. Andrew Miller. My research includes topics primarily in Cryptography, both theoretical and applied. I also enjoy exploring topics in Consensus, Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Game theory, Economics and Philosophy. In my free time, I like to cook, ride motorcycle, watch comedy shows and documentaries, play guitar and introspect.
Mustafa Al-Bassam
Mustafa completed his Ph.D. at the Information Security Research Group of the Department of Computer Science at University College London. He is CEO of Celestia Labs and Co-founder of Chainspace (acquired by Facebook). His research interests include the intersections of peer-to-peer systems, distributed ledgers and information security.
Enis Ceyhun Alp
Ceyhun completed his PhD program at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland under the supervision of Prof. Bryan Ford. His research interests are in distributed systems, smart contracts, and security.
Sarah Azouvi
Sarah is a research scientist at Protocol Labs, working in ConsensusLabs. Her interests lie at the intersection of Applied Cryptography, Distributed Systems, and Game Theory. During her Ph.D., she mostly worked on decentralized consensus protocols but also looked at other aspects of decentralized systems such as their governance.
Kushal Babel
Kushal Babel obtained his PhD from Cornell Tech, where he was advised by Ari Juels. He is currently working as a senior researcher at Monad Labs. Kushal has broad research interests and experience, ranging from Cryptoeconomics (MEV) and Consensus to smart contract security and cryptography. He is building novel financial instruments and highly performant and robust blockchain systems and applications.
Bolton Bailey
Bolton joined Pi Squared as a Proof Engineer after completing his PhD program at UIUC under the supervision of prof. Andrew Miller. His research interests are in Formal Methods, SNARKs, and Cryptographic Protocols.
Shehar Bano
Shehar Bano is a Research Scientist at Novi (Facebook) based in London. She is also a visiting researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. Shehar’s research interests centre on networked and distributed systems, particularly in the context of security and performance. Her key areas of research include blockchains, information control (censorship & discrimination), internet measurement, and malware and intrusion detection.
Cristina Basescu
Cristina completed her Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. Bryan Ford. She enjoys designing and building fast, reliable systems. Her research interests include fault tolerance and scalability in distributed systems, network security, and consensus protocols.
Soumya Basu
Soumya Basu completed his Ph.D. program at Cornell CS under the supervision of Emin Gün Sirer. He is primarily looking at how to provide strong security guarantees in blockchain technology without sacrificing performance. He also spends some time looking at the financial incentives involved in decentralized cryptocurrencies. For more up to date information, please visit his website.
Matthew Burke
Matt completed his PhD at Cornell University under the supervision of prof. Lorenzo Alvisi. He has joined Datablocks as a Software Engineer working on the Caching Team.
Burcu Canakci
Burcu completed his graduate program at Cornell University working with Robbert van Renesse. Currently, he has joined Microsoft Research Cambridge.
Raymond Cheng
Raymond Cheng is a research scientist, entrepreneur, open source software developer, and adjunct professor, who is passionate about building technology that improves the lives and freedoms of internet users. He has made contributions in a wide range of areas in distributed systems and security, including data privacy, secure computing, blockchains, and scalable network systems.
Hao Chung
I recently completed my PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, where I am fortunate to have Elaine Shi as my advisor. My research lies in the intersection between mechanism design and cryptography with a focus on blockchain technologies. Previously, I was a research assistant at Academia Sinica, hosted by Kai-Min Chung. Before that, I was a blockchain researcher at DEXON foundation. I got my master’s degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, and I got my bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan University, where I majored in physics and minored in philosophy.
Philip Daian
Philip Daian is a Computer Science graduate student at Cornell University. He brings experience in the formal verification and automotive domains, and looks forward to building the next generation of efficient and open financial cryptosystems.
Yael Doweck
Yael Doweck graduated from the Technion and was advised by Prof. Ittay Eyal. Currently, she works at StarkWare. She is interested in distributed systems, cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency exchanges.
Ayush Dubey
Ayush Dubey is a Software Engineer with TensorFlow, focusing on distributed runtime and performance. He completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2017 at Cornell University.
Nicolas Gailly
Nicolas was a software engineer before enrolling as a doctoral student at EPFL working in the decentralized systems group DEDIS. Upon completion of his Ph.D. program he has joined Protocol Labs as a Research Engineer. His research interests are decentralized systems & applied cryptography.
Adem Efe Gencer
Adem Efe Gencer received his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University. His research interests lie in the fields of Distributed Systems and Networking with a focus on improving the scalability of blockchain technologies.
Yue Guo
Yue Guo completed her PhD program at Cornell University, Computer Science Department under the supervision of prof. Elaine Shi. Currently, she works at JP Morgan Research. She is interested in cryptography and system security.
Charlie Hou
Charlie completed his Ph.D. at CMU advised by Giulia Fanti. He is a research scientist at Meta interested in robustness of data-driven systems.
Yan Ji
Yan Ji completed her PhD under the supervision of prof. Ari Juels at Cornell Tech. She is interested in blockchain technologies and other areas intersecting security, applied cryptography and distributed systems.
George Kappos
George completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at University College London working with Sarah Meiklejohn. He is researching privacy in cryptocurrencies and has joined Chainalysis.
Ariah Klages-Mundt
Ariah Klages-Mundt completed his Ph.D. in Applied Math at Cornell University and he is leading the R&D team at Gyroscope. His research is at the intersection of computer science and economics on the design of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and economic networks. He brings prior experience working in the financial technology sector.
Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias
I am a Research Scientist at Mysten Labs working on Blockchains, Applied Cryptography and Distributed Computing. Before that I was a Research Scientist at Facebook and an Assistant Professor at IST Austria. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from EPFL, and my MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens.
Yunqi Li
Yunqi Li completed her PhD program at UIUC working with Andrew Miller. She is a Research Scientist at Meta interested in system security, P2P network, and blockchain technology.
Sishan Long
Sishan Long completed her program at Cornell University advised by prof. Ari Juels, and has joined Espresso Systems. She is interested in blockchain technologies.
Alex Manuskin
Alex is a researcher working at StarkWare. He is interested in distributed systems, scaling cryptocurrencies and security.
Krishna Deepak Maram
Deepak completed his Ph.D. degree at Cornell University working with Ari Juels and has since joined Mysten Labs.
Sinisa Matetic
Sinisa Matetic is a research scientist at ETH Zurich. He was born in Split, Croatia. Prior to joining ETH Zurich, he worked as a Management Consultant at A.T. Kearney in the SEE region. Sinisa’s research interest are in system security focusing on distributed systems, trusted hardware, blockchain-based technology design and integrity protection.
Michael Mirkin
Michael Mirkin completed his PhD at the Technion under the supervision of prof. Ittay Eyal. He’s interested in distributed systems, cryptography, and P2P networks.
Bineet Mishra
Bineet completed his Ph.D. in Economics at Cornell University. His main research interests are at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. His current research agenda aims to understand the implications of new financial technologies, such as introduction of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), for monetary policy and financial stability. Additionally, he works on international capital flows, with special focus on the safe assets, to understand the effects of financial linkages and spillovers among the countries.
Ujval Misra
Ujval is a PhD student at UC Berkeley working with Dawn Song. His research interests broadly lie in security, privacy and decentralized trust.
Amani Moin
Amani is PhD candidate in Economics with research in Corporate Finance and Financial Technology. She is also the Chief Cryptoeconomist at AVA Labs. Her research interests are in empirical corporate finance, machine learning, and cryptocurrencies.
Vivek Nair
I am passionate about defending our digital world and have spent over a decade researching applied cryptographic techniques to secure critical systems. I previously served as a Technical Lead within elite cyber units of the Department of Defense (DOD) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where I received the directorate’s Exceptional Performance Award for advancing the frontiers of US cyber operations. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley at the age of 22, supported by prestigious fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Physical Science Consortium, and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation.
Oded Naor
Oded obtained his Masters under the supervision of prof. Ittay Eyal. He has joined StarkWare working as a Product Manager & Blockchain Researcher. His research interests include blockchains, security, and distributed systems in general.
Youer Pu
Oded obtained his Masters under the supervision of prof. Ittay Eyal. He has joined StarkWare working as a Product Manager & Blockchain Researcher. His research interests include blockchains, security, and distributed systems in general.
Gengmo Qi
Gengmo completed his Ph.D. program in Computer Science at Cornell University and has joined Drangonfly as a research partner. His interest broadly include security and privacy, distributed systems, and cryptoeconomics.
Qihong Ruan
Qihong Ruan completed his PhD in Economics at Cornell University working on crypto, DeFi, and FinTech, advised by Prof. Maureen O’Hara and Lin William Cong. His research covers cryptocurrencies market microstructure, crypto derivatives trading, cryptocurrency investment of households, and DeFi trading platforms. Qihong is particularly excited about the intersection of AI and blockchain, the economic incentives in blockchain systems, and business applications of blockchains and Web3. His work has been presented at high-profile conferences such as the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) Connect Conference, FinTech, AI, and Big Data conference, the Northern Finance Association (NFA) Annual Meeting, and Tokenomics. Qihong’s research aims to deepen understanding of cutting-edge blockchain technologies and their practical implementation in the financial sector.
Sergi Delgado Segura
Sergi is a Bitcoin dev and researcher at Chaincode Labs. Also, he’s the lead developer and maintainer of The Eye of Satoshi. My research interest lies on Bitcoin, networks and privacy.
Kevin Sekniqi
Kevin Sekniqi is COO at Ava Labs.
Florian Suri-Payer
I graduated with a PhD in CS from Cornell University where I was fortunate to be advised by Lorenzo Alvisi and Natacha Crooks(UC Berkeley). Prior to grad school I completed my undergrad in CS at TU Berlin, Germany. Outside research, I am an avid tennis player and member of the Cornell Club Tennis team.
Weizhao Tang
Weizhao completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University supervised by Dr. Giulia Fanti. Prior to this he received his Master’s degree (2021) from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Research Scientist at Meta. His research interests are privacy and security of distributed systems, particularly cryptocurrency systems based on blockchain.
Pasindu Tennage
Pasindu completed his PhD at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. Bryan Ford. Pasindu enjoys designing and building new distributed algorithms and performance tuning. Pasindu’s research interests include consensus algorithms, resilient systems and performance optimization.
Itay Tsabary
Itay Tsabary completed his PhD at the Technion and was advised by Prof. Ittay Eyal. Currently, he works in research at StarkWare. He is interested in distributed systems, cryptocurrencies and game theory.
Karl Wüst
Karl completed his PhD in the System Security Group at ETH Zurich. Currently, he is a faculty member at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information. His main research interest is blockchain technology with a focus on security and privacy.
Lun Wang
Lun Wang obtained his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley advised by prof. Dawn Song. Currently, he has joined Google. His research interest is in the intersection of machine learning and security, data privacy, programming language, blockchains and applied cryptography.
Yu Wang
Yu Wang completed his PhD in the Economics department at Cornell University and an affiliate of the DEFT Lab. He studied macroeconomics and finance, with a focus on firm investment behavior and the non-fungible token market.
Tiancheng Xie
I earned my Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley security group, under the guidance of Dawn Song. My BEng in Computer Science was obtained from the ACM Class at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. My research primarily revolves around cryptography and algorithms.
Siqiu Yao
Siqiu Yao has completed his PhD at Cornell University under the supervision of prof. Andrew Myers. He is interested in building blockchain systems and smart contract languages with better security.
Matan Yechieli
Matan completed his Master of Science program at the Technion under the supervision of prof. Ittay Eyal. His research interests include blockchain systems, security, and cryptocurrencies.
Maofan (Ted) Yin
Ted completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University, co-advised by Prof. Emin Gun Sirer and Prof. Robbert van Renesse. He’s previously worked closely with Dr. Dahlia Malkhi. His research focuses on fundamental problems of fault-tolerance, consensus protocols, and peer-to-peer systems. He’s currently tackling challenges in blockchains, from a system perspective.
Tom Yurek
Tom Yurek completed his Ph.D. at UIUC working with Andrew Miller. He is interested in Privacy and Applied Cryptography.
Haoqian Zhang
Haoqian is a Ph.D. candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). His research interests lie in the general area of decentralized systems, particularly in blockchain, as well as their applications in cryptocurrency and smart contracts.
Yunhao Zhang
Yunhao Zhang completed his PhD at Cornell University under the supervision of prof. Lorenzo Alvisi. His research interest spans distributed systems, game theory, and mechanism design. He is a recipient of the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI’20 and the 2021 Facebook Fellowship.
Mingxun Zhou
Mingxun Zhou completed his Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of prof. Giulia Fanti and prof. Elaine Shi. His research interests include privacy-preserving algorithm design and the algorithmic foundation of blockchain. Before joining CMU, he received his bachelor’s degree from Peking University.
IC3 - The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts 